


"What made you choose infantry?"

by orphan_account



Series: The Gentler Sex?: Evan Wright Gets Down and Dirty with First Recon's First Female Marines [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 11:09:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So she'd enlisted, heart pounding like a war drum.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"What made you choose infantry?"

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Neely, for reading this.

Nat wasn’t Catholic, but she had gone to Catholic school (St. Ignatius of Loyola’s), so the usual papers (just a paragraph long, because they were just practicing) you wrote in sixth grade weren’t about ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ or ‘who is your biggest inspiration’; they were about ‘what can you do to live in God’s love’ or ‘why was this saint made a saint’.

That last one, that was what had gotten her. The kids in her class were each assigned a saint (so there wasn’t a big rush for whomever they’d been named after) and she had gotten Joan of Arc.

It hadn’t been as simple as that; it had just planted a seed in her mind that, given historical precedent, she could lead an army. Didn’t matter if there was resistance, because Joan had dealt with the same shit and Joan had overcome it and Joan had become a fucking saint because of it. And not just a saint, but a patron and not just a patron, but the patron of soldiers.

Joan had done it. She could, too. Follow in her grandfather’s footsteps, maybe.

Her parents had wanted her to be a doctor; every Christmas, until she was too old, they bought her a biography (from picture books to easy readers to heavy-ass tomes that she always finished, out of obligation) about some Lady Pioneer(™) in the medical field, as if that could uproot Jeanne D’Arc striding into battle with a banner as her only protection (probably bullshit, because who the fuck would allow a sixteen-year-old girl onto the field without even a shield, but still) and replace it with Florence fucking Nightingale.

She might’ve still done pre-med but she kept on at St. Ig’s and, in ninth grade, started learning Latin (it was a Jesuit school), which meant the retranslating the classics (Caesar and Vergil and none of the others, because they were all too dirty for pure young minds), which meant a shitton of reading about wars and the virtuous Romans who fought them. Nobody besides her liked doing the translations; no one besides her bothered to actually do the translating, often opting for copying out of a recent (but not too recent) book borrowed from the public library.

(Use one from the school library and you ran the risk of the teacher knowing exactly whose translation you were using, because he had specifically requested it, having enjoyed it very much.)

She was fourteen - her brain was still developing and reading the classics once in the Latin, then writing them out again in the English must have made them stick - the hard stoicism and the absolute devotion of these men (no women, as virtus came from vir, not femina) to their comrades, of these commanders to their men. And it reminded her of Joan, so she kept reading more of it and the more she read of it, the more it reminded her of Joan and then Julius and then Aeneas and so on, a feedback loop of blood spilt and battles fought.

But-

But Nat still wasn’t thinking about joining the Marines, or any branch of the military, for that matter. Just about being a double major in Classics and Polisci - maybe one day getting to see war from its edges as an outside analyst, which wouldn’t have been enough, but better than nothing.

Then they’d started running women, enlisted and officers, through SOI, as test cases; she had several discussions with the girls in her sorority about what this meant. She nodded her head at the various points made (regardless of their premise) without really hearing, because she was trying to find out who the test cases were, how she measured up to them, a half-formed plan in her head.

Then, the majority of the tests (seventy-five percent enlisted, sixty percent officers) didn’t fail, so they opened up the infantry; she’d broached the subject with her boyfriend at the time, face hot despite the chill of the winter air and he made a really stupid fucking joke about how would you know the difference between the women and the men.

Nat didn’t smile, not even in that polite way she had for her parents’ friends, when she was waiting for something new to be said, to wipe away the idiocy they had just spewed.

Then, she got letters: one from the Army, one from the Navy, one from the Air Force, and one from the Marines. And only the Marines threw the gauntlet down, asking her if she had it in her to be a trailblazer, with the heavy implication that she did not.

So she picked it up and enlisted, heart pounding like a war drum.

 

Ree had just sorta fallen into the Corps. She wasn’t Brit; she wasn’t born wanting to do it. And she wasn’t Fick; no Amazons in shining armor for her. She wasn’t Win, either; she had other options, had a full ride at the closest she’d ever get to an Ivy. Maybe a bit like Trombley, ‘cept she wasn’t a fucking psycho.

(Not much of one, at least; not more than was acceptable, for a Marine, or at least, she hoped so.)

No, she’d fallen into it, the summer before she went off to college; almost completely passed the recruiting station by, remembered something somebody said about “females in combat” (somebody not to be associating with, using “female” like that), and walked in, no plan in mind.

She was tired of planning, tired of fucking thinking. That summer was supposed to involve as little thought as possible; no more polishing, no more calculating so some rich motherfucker could arbitrarily decide she was good enough to be let into their overpriced, overrated shitball school.

When Reporter asked why, she’d said she’d been dared. Which wasn’t entirely fucking true; it wasn’t like one of her friends had said, “Hey, bet you won’t join the largest collection of useless fucking idiots known to man.” They’d actually tried to get her to stay. But the recruiter (which meant he had been so fucking useless, they’d stuck him in a shitty little storefront with a single shitty fan off the main drag of Nevada, so he couldn’t fuck up anything actually important), but the recruiter had been so goddamn dismissive.

Like, she hadn’t even sat down before the prick said, “Miss-” (First of all, first of fucking all, she didn’t care about shit like that, but why didn’t he use ‘Ma’am’, like, what the fuck, even cops used ma’am) “-Basic Training is not sleepaway camp. It’s not going to be fun, it’s not going to be clean. You’re being trained to be part of the toughest goddamn fighting machine in the entire world. I’m sure you’ve heard about us opening up the infantry to women, but that doesn’t mean we’re lowering our standards.”

And then, legit, he gave her the fucking up and down, like that could have told him something other than what she’d thrown on that morning. (Well, technically, she’d woken up in them on some girl’s couch, but she had thrown them on, some morning.)

So, she said, in her cleanest, most cornfed English, like the way she made herself talk in the interviews, “I haven’t heard anything about it.” Paused for a bit too long. “Sir.”

“Let me finish: you can enlist but might not even get assigned to infantry. You might get funneled into signalling or engineering-”

“Oh, that’s fine. Just as long as I get to join up.” And her lips had pulled themselves into the biggest shiteating grin they had ever managed. And he’d smiled back, genuinely, the fucking idiot.

Again, Ree hadn’t even planned on going in; she had only been killing time until she found something to do, or until she fell asleep and the day started over, bringing her that much closer to when she’d have to think again.

But the fact that the first time the recruiter hadn’t looked like he had shit in his mouth was when she said she was wanted to do some cushy fucking POG job, that stuck with her like bruise, from the drive to the MEPS to when the counselor asked her what she wanted to specialize in.

So, without hesitating, she had answered, “Infantry.”

The lady looked at her and scribbled something down. “All right. Just repeat after me.”

And, word for word, she echoed an oath she wouldn’t remember afterwards, because the entire time she could only think about how she’d gotten one over that shitass from the recruiting office.

 

When Brit had joined, infantry hadn’t been open to women, but at the MEPS, they asked her if she was interested, and she had said yes. It had felt right. It had felt correct, more correct than college or a gap year or anything else her parents had offered instead of the Corps.

Maybe that meant something was wrong with her, but it was her, nonetheless.

They sent her through more tests; they made her do the physical exam over again, this time with male standards, and they sent her in to talk with an actual psychologist, like they’d catch something they hadn’t caught before. She passed, of course.

And they asked her if she understood what she had agreed to.

Brit gave an answer that didn’t matter because they already had her, body and soul.

And she went off to Basic, in a bus older than the school she’d gone to.

The other women there, they had reasons they wouldn’t fucking stop talking about: being proof, being a pioneer, being the first.

For her, it was about being.

So, she never flinched, not at showering with a group of strangers (most of them men and all of them leery or leering), not at the DIs who had it in for every recruit lacking a piece of meat swinging between their legs, not at the fact that, one by one, women started dropping like flies, until she and about three others were left. Nothing mattered but getting through.

And she did, of course.

 

 


End file.
